When You Have Nothing to Say

(Talking to myself and listening, too – an excerpt)

Say it with a lot of flowery and complexly strung together sentences. Say it with as much mess as you can amass. Massage the blank page with black letters that string along a lot of nonsense until something comes to mind, a compelling download from a voice that is struggling to be heard, a piece of wisdom stuck in your teeth that you – thankfully – never managed to floss away.

When there is nothing to say, say it loud and proud. After all, you are a wise woman with many years of nothing left to say said loud and sometimes proudly and sometimes with the attitude of “If you don’t like it, don’t listen,” or “If you don’t like it, forget it as soon as it is said, but I am, I have, I will.”

Don’t worry about grammar or tone or syntax. Okay, I know you. You can’t not worry about spelling. Somehow with all the things that keep you from expressing yourself – fear of failure, embarrassment, success, longing for more from the ones who listen – the thing that you worry most about is spelling. How mundane.

But mundanity is your stock in trade isn’t it? asks another voice that demands to be heard on this topic. “The Extraordinary Ordinary,” you respond with righteous indignation and not a little bit of astonishment that the being voicing its opinion doesn’t know the difference. After all, isn’t it part of you? Are there really parts of you that just don’t know what is going on though they emerge from the same source?

Channeling these voices is an exhausting process. You feel yourself losing steam just when you thought you had a good clip going and you know you have been hijacked by that lazy … okay not lazy … insecure … please don’t use that word … uncertain (sigh!) young person who never grew up because… well who knows why not. There seems to be some part of me that will always be a child. That has to be okay.…